


Something Always Sings

by reinkist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Anxiety, Bad Reactions to Food, Blood, Discussions of Suicide, Domestic, Grief, Hermaphroditic Trolls, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Necessary Self-Harm, No Really This Is Mostly Just Domestic, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Hatred, Survival, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-05-12 18:03:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5675419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reinkist/pseuds/reinkist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat used to think a lot about destiny, or about fate. Grand purpose, or untimely death. He was always anchored, as if by a rope, to some nebulous point in time, dragging himself forward, hand over hand, to reach it.</p><p>Worrying about the future comes naturally to him. Loving the present, though.</p><p>That's what Dave is for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_"In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate."_ _-Isaac Asimov_

 

"Hey," Dave calls from downstairs. "Karkat! It looks like there's gonna be a really bad storm."

The springs in the desk chair all creak sharply in unison as Karkat jumps up and runs over to the window. He rubs the dust off one of the panes with the bottom hem of his shirt and looks out, hands cupped around his face.

The southwestern sky is dark, almost black, crowded with clouds that are absolutely bulging with rain. Karkat swears and runs back over to the computer.

"I'm just gonna leave it! We can come back later!"

Dave's footsteps thunder up the stairs. "Don't you even dare," he yells. Karkat rolls his eyes and flops back down into the chair.

"You seriously want to risk the chickens for fucking _Escape From L.A._?"

"That and like a hundred gigs of other shit!" Dave says, poking his head up over the landing. "We have time. And Bec'll take care of them until we get back."

Karkat raises an eyebrow. "A hundred gigs is the size of the _hard drive_. Turns out, there's less than twenty gigs filled up, and it's pretty much all porn."

Dave laughs and comes up behind him, bending down, resting his chin on Karkat's hair, curling his arms around his shoulders.

"And by porn I mean, like, 90% shit with MILFs."

"Oh, fuck, is it Christmas? This is gonna be awesome. Me, you, a fire in the fireplace, the sound of rain on the roof, watching Kurt Russell munch on scenery in an eyepatch, and when we really need something to get us going we can watch some college dude get fucked by his roommate's mom." His hands start crawling their way down Karkat's chest, and Karkat laughs and swats at him.

"Quit it, you're gonna give me a static charge." Karkat complains, then leans back, smiling up at Dave, who gives him a quick peck on the lips.

"OK, yeah, gotta be sure we preserve those moms for like, all time," Dave laughs.

"Hold on, what the fuck are you _wearing_?" Karkat shoves at Dave and twists around in the chair, eyes flicking up and down the half magenta, half turquoise jacket that Dave has zipped all the way to his chin. It's about three sizes too big, and hangs down almost all the way to the bottom hem of his shorts.

"It's a windbreaker! Found it in the back of a closet. Only thing worth taking in this whole damn house so far."

Karkat laughs, running a hand over his forehead. "Jesus christ."

"That and this." Dave pulls a dusty brown rock from the pocket of his new jacket and waggles it in Karkat's face. "It's a trilobite."

There are tapering, symmetrical ridges all along the top of the rock, forming the back of what Karkat guesses is some kind of prehistoric roach. "Oh, good." Karkat smiles, without even meaning to. It's just. Dave. Being himself.

Dave drops the rock back into his pocket. "Yeah, I think this dude took all the good shit with him when he left. But, I still have a couple of closets to go through," Dave says, grinning, and turns toward the stairs. The feeble light from the window glints off the edge of the sword strapped to his back.

Karkat unhooks his laptop from the hard drive in the half-assembled computer on the desk, shuts it, and stows it in a foam-lined pocket of his backpack. He picks up his screwdriver and bites down on the end of his penlight with a set of sharp incisors, squinting intently into the interior of the computer. He starts unscrewing the tiny screws at the corners of the hard drive, and after a minute or two the hard drive is wrapped in thin foam and stashed in his backpack. He makes quick work of the rest of the most useful parts: motherboard, RAM sticks, DVD drive. They already have a huge fucking stockpile of this shit, but it never hurts to be prepared.

He joins Dave out on the sidewalk a little while later. Dave has the windbreaker tied around his waist, the back of it hanging all the way down to his knees, and the two of them stare into the distance over the ruined city, into the oncoming path of the storm. The clouds are moving quickly, rolling, tripping over and over each other against the bruised southwestern sky. The air has a sudden, drastic chill to it, and Karkat shivers against the choppy wind, hands rubbing up and down his bare arms, the smell of ozone in his nose.

"Jesus, we should go," Karkat says, still staring up at the sky.

"Yeah, OK," Dave mutters, and they make a run for Dave's bike, Dave pulling the sheath of his sword over his head as he goes and tossing the whole thing at Karkat. Karkat slings it over one shoulder, and it bounces against his backpack.

Dave swings a leg over the crossbar of his bike. Karkat jumps onto the back seat, which is bolted onto the cargo rack over the back wheel, and he grabs Dave around the waist just as he begins to pedal. Fat raindrops hit the pavement, two at a time, five at a time, and Dave peels out of the driveway, out of the neighborhood.

"Maybe this time the water'll fill the whole tank," Dave yells over the rain. Karkat grits his teeth as Dave skids the bike into a sharp turn, hiding his face in the middle of Dave's back. Karkat can bike longer distances, but Dave is faster over short ones, even with both of them on the same bike. He's nimbler. Mainly because he's not afraid to take stupid fucking risks.

"Yeah, maybe!" Karkat yells back. Rain is dripping off the ends of his hair, running over his collarbones and under his shirt. His back is already soaked.

They get home in less than twenty minutes. Bec is barking up a storm, and Karkat's relieved to see that he's already herded all the chickens back into the coop. He bounds around the two of them the instant they get inside the fence, paws splashing in the rain, still barking and barking, and Dave and Karkat dump all their shit in the garage before hauling a tarp out from the back corner and throwing it over the chicken coop. The chickens are freaking the fuck out, screeching like the world is ending, and the two of them run around the coop on opposite sides, tying the tarp down, lightning illuminating everything in sharp bursts, thunder rattling the windows.

They're absolutely soaked by the time they finish. Karkat grabs his backpack and they haul ass up onto the covered porch, kicking off their sodden shoes and socks, Bec bounding after them. He shakes himself immediately, spraying them with water all over again, and they laugh and yell in protest. Rain pours off the roof on all sides, visibility down to nothing, like they're standing behind a god damned waterfall. Dave lays his windbreaker lovingly over the back of a chair. They both strip out of their wet clothes, wring them out, lay them flat to dry.

Dave runs inside and comes back out with a whole stack of towels. Bec dances around his feet, and Dave throws a towel over his back. Karkat gratefully wraps up in one of the larger ones, striped black and tan, and it feels amazing, soft and warm against the clammy chill on his skin. Dave is toweling Bec off, murmuring utter nonsense to him, making his soggy white fur stick up in clumps. Bec is beyond excited, licking at Dave's chin any moment the towel isn't in the way.

They finally go inside, and Bec makes a run for the living room, nails scrabbling on the wooden floor. "I am so serious about that fire," Dave says, toweling his hair, and Karkat absently appreciates the lines of his body while he dries his own.

"It's been over a year since we cleaned out the chimney," Karkat says, squinting down the hall into the living room at it, worst case scenarios from books flashing through his mind, of outline drawings of humans fleeing from fire and collapsed over furniture, suffocating from smoke inhalation.

Dave shrugs. "It's fine. It'll be fine. Nothing's going to happen. I accept full responsibility if the house burns down." Karkat snorts, and Dave kisses him on the forehead.

It's only September. They haven't needed to light a fire anywhere but the stove outside since the previous February, and as Dave puts a lighter to the corner of a bit of paper Karkat prays that no birds have died in the chimney since then. The summer had been brutally hot, the sun at times seeming almost as bright and almost as unbearable as the Alternian one, so it's not like either of them was thinking about it yet.

When Karkat comes back into the living room with a new shirt, Bec is chewing intently at a big, knotted up piece of leather on his bed in the corner. The rain has died down quite a bit now into a light shower, tapping steadily on the roof, and as the fire eats enthusiastically through the kindling, Karkat curls up on the couch, pulling a huge, fluffy quilt up over his bare legs, all the way up to his chin. Dave comes back in the room with Karkat's backpack, roots around in it until he finds the hard drive, and it's not long before they're lying together on the chaise section of the couch. Dave's laptop is open towards them on the coffee table, and they watch the movie, holding each other close, legs tangling, glorious and warm and wonderful.

"What the _fuck_ ," Karkat says, later, eyes glued to the movie like it's a trainwreck. Which it is.

Dave has barely been able to contain himself. It's a little over halfway through the movie and Kurt Russell is literally surfing and Dave is laughing hysterically into his hands. Karkat watches him, a slow grin spreading over his face, and when Dave notices him looking Karkat tilts his hips, sliding one leg up and across Dave's lap. Dave bites his lip, still grinning, hand travelling up the back of Karkat's thigh to his ass, and Karkat rolls his hips, sucking kisses all the way up Dave's throat. "Wait, is this a thing for you now? Watching me lose my shit?" Dave laughs, grabbing at Karkat's thigh, pulling it tightly against him, grinding against it.

"No, I just love you," Karkat says, matter-of-factly, kissing at Dave's ear, and Dave starts laughing again, hand dragging roughly over Karkat's ass to his waist and back to his hip.

"I love you too," Dave says, breathlessly, and Karkat rolls entirely on top of him, pinning his hips, biting at the line of his jaw.

 

_The lights of the landing craft against the purpling dusk sky momentarily blind him. Two more smaller scout ships drop out of the sky behind the first, and the street flashes bright as day as the ships touch down effortlessly onto the concrete. Then all the lights are abruptly extinguished and Karkat is blind again, afterimages swimming in his eyes._

_They all duck into an alley, behind a dumpster, and Karkat can't breathe, bloodpusher hammering in terror. "Leave. Hide. Leave now. Please!"_

_John grips the handle of his sledgehammer, eyebrows sharply drawn. Jade raises her rifle, and the two of them exchange a look that fills Karkat with terror. They can't, they can't..._

_"No fight. Please!" Karkat hisses, grabbing at the hem of Jade's skirt. Jade smiles at him, lopsided and bright. She lays her rifle across her lap and takes his hand in both of hers._

_"It'll be OK. I promise! We'll protect you," Jade whispers, squeezing his hand, the tips of her fingers cool against his palm, and John grins, wide and confident._

_"Don't worry!" John mouths. The sound of marching boots echo down the street, and Jade cocks her rifle._


	2. Chapter 2

_“In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.” -Dan Simmons_

Karkat wakes up first.

It's before dawn, and the light that's beginning to creep in across the floor is dim and pale. Dave is breathing deeply, steadily, beside him, Bec at their feet, laid out across the foot of the bed. Karkat rolls over, slinging an arm across Dave's shoulders, nuzzling against his neck.

"Dave. Wake up."

Dave takes a quick breath in through his nose, then puts an arm over Karkat's, palm slotting, practiced, against his shoulder blade. "Hey," he says, voice rough, his hand sliding up Karkat's back, up his neck, fingers curling into his hair.

They lie together a little longer than they probably should, until the beam of sunlight from the eastern window crawls all the way up the side of the bed and over the quilt, and Bec twitches awake. He jumps on Dave, licking at his face, and Dave laughs in delight, wrestling with him, until Bec gets way too excited and scrambles off the bed and down the stairs in a fury of energy. They can hear him barking all the way downstairs, and Karkat rolls out of bed first, sighing. Dave follows him a moment later, groaning and rubbing his palms over his arms.

"Is it fucking autumn suddenly? This sucks. I hate this. It's cold," Dave whines.

Karkat peers out the window. Everything is wet. The backyard is a mess of mud and small debris, but the sun is just starting to reach the tops of the trees, unbearably yellow against the black outlines of the branches. "Dude, it'll warm up."

"I guess we should clean up the backyard before we let the chickens out," Dave grumbles, resting his chin on top of Karkat's head, between his horns. "We should check the greenhouse, too, make sure nothing got broken..."

Karkat leans back against him, and Dave's arms go around his waist. Dave nuzzles at his neck, the motion rough with morning stubble, kissing up under the collar of his shirt, nose cold against his skin. Karkat hugs Dave's arms to him, smiling wider and wider. "I was going to check on the crickets. I can start up the stove after that."

"Yeah, yeah, cool, whatever, I'll do _all_ the yard shit," Dave complains into his neck, laughs, and squeezes him.

Karkat fills a bowl with water, lights a candle and tromps all the way down the dark stairs. He opens the door of the walk-in closet off the basement that Dave refers to as "cricket hell" and other similarly derogatory variations, and he's hit by a wall of high-pitched chirping. He holds the candle up to all the aquarium tanks in turn, and everything seems normal, the candlelight shining off the backs of hundreds of crickets, glinting off their eyes.

He lets out a breath. There wasn't really any reason to think the storm would've fucked anything up down here, but. He sets the candle between a couple of the tanks and reaches into each of them in turn, taking out the sponges that act as the crickets' water sources, rewetting and replacing them. He closes the door again, letting out another breath of relief.

By the time Karkat's dragged out enough firewood from the giant stack inside the garage and has the fire going, Dave's done cleaning up the yard and all the chickens are out, scratching in the drying mud. Bec's probably watching them around the corner of the house, but as soon as food appears, Karkat knows he'll come running. "Whew," Dave says, sliding a basket onto the table, unzipping his new windbreaker, stripping down to a tank top. He waves the jacket in the air. "I need to fuckin', alter this or something. It's actually like, impractically big."

"Do you have eggs in that basket or what?" Karkat nods at it, and sets a frying pan on top of the grill.

Dave jumps. "Fuck! Sorry." He tosses his jacket over one of the chairs and digs around in the basket. "Here's some eggs. And!" He pulls out a huge, red tomato with a flourish. "It's finally ripe, finally, fuck yeah, mutant tomato omelet."

"Oh, yeah. Good." Karkat cracks the eggs into the skillet and watches Dave cut up the tomato out of the corner of his eye. Dave's practically bouncing, humming tunelessly to himself, knife slicing, quickly, practiced. He's been seriously pining after this particular tomato ever since it started growing weird, dividing almost completely in two, until it looked like two separate tomatoes sharing one stem. "Like those cows with two heads," Dave tried to explain, but had no way to elaborate.

The firepit is housed inside a repurposed gazebo with an improvised chimney in the center of the conical roof, a metal grill and a spit over a raised bed of dirt for the actual fire to sit in. There's a table and chairs that they use more for food prep than actual sitting, because they usually eat inside, at the dining room table, or more often, on the couch. It's damp, now. Everything is damp.

"Oh yeah and the greenhouse is fine, but dude, maybe sometime soon we should try to cut down some of the branches in that tree?" Dave points at the large oak in the next yard over. "Because that could've been bad."

Karkat looks out from under the gazebo and up at the tree, and Dave's right. It's getting huge, and the longest branches are stretching farther over the yard than Karkat remembered. "Shit, yeah," he says, frowning, turning back to the eggs. "How the fuck are we supposed to get up there?"

"I dunno. A ladder? Here, do you want this yet?" Dave offers up the cutting board full of tomatoes.

"Uh, sure, fine." Dave pushes the tomato into the skillet with his knife. "There's no way our ladder is tall enough to get all the way the fuck up there."

"We could find another one."

Karkat raises his eyebrows. "Where? Oh. Fuck. That was _way_ too much tomato."

Dave looks down at the frying pan and snorts. "Yeah, sorry, uh. I'll definitely still eat it, whatever. And I don't know, maybe we could take one off a fire truck."

"What the shitting hell is a fire truck?"

"Emergency vehicle. Red. Sirens and flashing lights. Giant ass ladder?"

Karkat tries to remember it from a movie. "What? No, no, what the fuck, how could we _possibly_ carry that around?" Dave shrugs, grabs the spatula from Karkat's hand, and starts stirring the eggs, grinning.

They put a big pot of water from the rain tank over the fire while they eat, and Karkat keeps a diligent eye on it out the dining room window. Dave reads at the table, a book he's been raving a lot about lately, and one that he's been begging Karkat to read as soon as he's finished. Karkat doesn't really think he wants to, but he loves Dave when he talks about it, all bright eyes and broad gestures. Bec chews on dried venison in the corner, and when they get up from the table Dave dumps the last little bit of his food in Bec's bowl.

The water is boiling when they get back outside, and Karkat carries the pot over to the large tub in a small shed by the house. Dave joins him with a couple of buckets from the rain tank, and they both go back and forth for a couple of minutes, filling the tub with water.

They bathe in silence. Birds are singing on the rooftops around them, and the storm is probably only a distant nightmare by now in their minds. The water is warm, not hot, but heat is already building as the sun leaves the horizon behind. And yeah. After all that time near the fire, the water feels amazing. Dave shaves his face in the tub, looking into the mirror that hangs on the wall beside them. Later Karkat interrupts Dave's shampooing with a line of kisses down his neck and over his shoulder, the sharp scent of aftershave in his nose, and Dave hums, pleased, his hands falling to Karkat's shoulders, covering them in soap suds.

"What do we need to do today, anyway?" Dave asks as he pulls on a t-shirt printed with a poster for a movie Karkat's never seen. "I should walk Bec, but after that?"

"We should do winter stuff," Karkat says, eyes flicking to the window. It's not like they haven't been, all spring, and all summer, but the memory of the chill in the morning air is making Karkat's stomach clench in worry. "We still have so much shit to do..."

Dave comes over and hugs Karkat around the waist, warm and solid. Karkat drops his forehead to Dave's chest, breathing him in. "It's OK, babe, we got this. We always got this."

Karkat charges the laptops while Dave is out walking Bec. They have a crank generator attached to a stationary bike by the window in the living room, which turns the work generated by pedaling into electricity. It works well, but it's only really practical to use for recharging batteries, since you have to be constantly pedalling for it to have any kind of output. For years they've both been wanting to figure out how to build a large, rechargeable battery, to store a larger amount of power that could be used for light sources or small appliances. But neither of them is any kind of electrician, and specific information like that is difficult to come by now. He reads a romance novel while he pedals, one set two hundred years ago, when humans did everything by candlelight.

Dave comes back with a backpack full of the first apples from the tree down the street, Bec dancing at his heels. They spend the afternoon processing food, shucking corn and setting it out to dry in the sun, grinding crickets into high-protein flour. When the sun finally sets, they light candles and put on episodes of a show about humans in space. Karkat's eyelids get heavier and heavier until he nods off on the couch, his head on Dave's chest.

 

_It's still so bright._

_Karkat winces and lets the curtain fall. He curls back up in the corner of the ruined human building he's hidden himself in, hands tightening in his own hair. He's incompetent. Weak. A complete fucking idiot of a failure._

_He's hungry, now, and unbearably hot. What is he going to do? He's going to die here. Alone and afraid, completely disgraced. Even if he hadn't run like a cowardly little shit, they would have been right to abandon him, to throw him away like the traitorous garbage he is. All those human faces swim again in his memory, anguished, terrified, like they were in the seconds before the weapons of his squadron incinerated them where they stood. He drops his head to his knees._

_All he'd been good for was simple, replaceable infantry. Lowest of the low. And he failed, failed at even doing that._

_He couldn't kill anyone._

_And now he's alone._

_The sun finally sets, and Karkat stumbles out into the empty street. His uniform is soaked with sweat and smeared with dust, and his throat is parched, his tongue rough with thirst. There's a building on the corner with a display window full of what looks like packaged human food, but the door is locked, and no matter how hard Karkat pounds on the glass, with his fists, with his boots, with the refuse receptacle on the corner, he can't break it._

_Tears drip off his chin and splash onto the front of his uniform, then into his palms when he covers his face with both hands, shaking, exhausted. He's going to die. There's no question, anymore, about if, but when._

_He finds an abandoned tray of food on a table in an outdoor plaza. It's some sort of meat patty in between two pieces of a substance Karkat can't identify, but he wolfs the whole thing down anyway, half-eaten as it is. He eats the bunch of yellowish sticks formed out of some kind of processed, salty mash that was beside it, too, and washes the whole thing down with water from a bottle the next table over._

_It's fucking delicious._

_This planet's single moon is rising above the buildings when Karkat's gastric sac begins to hurt. He ignores it at first, gritting his teeth as he wanders the streets, but the pain narrows to a sharp cramp that leaves him sweating. He shouldn't have tried to eat. What was he thinking? Human food could all be poisonous to him. He could have survived fifteen more nights at least without food, but now, this is his last, and he never even had a chance._

_Karkat collapses onto a bench, curled up onto his side, arms around his middle. The pain sharpens again and he wants to yell, wants to scream and rant and rage, but the terror of discovery even in this abandoned city keeps him silent, keeps his eyes scrunched closed and his teeth clenched tight._

_He wakes up to the hot, stinking breath of a monster on his face._

_He's on his feet and growling before he even knows that he's awake, or alive. The monster barkbeast lets out a few sharp vocalizations, nose raised in the air, and Karkat drops into a fighting stance. His sickles are back in his hive, a lifetime away, on Alternia. The gun they gave him...he'd dropped it. How could he? Screams and flames fill his mind, and he snarls._

_A human voice calls from around the corner, and cold terror drops straight through his gut. This creature is a lusus, and its human isn't far behind._


	3. Chapter 3

_“It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's mine.” -Mark Z. Danielewski_

Corridors stretch out under his feet. They bend, twist, interlock, black like jet, or...oil. He sees the shape of them as if from the outside, knows them like a knot that could easily be cut straight down the middle. But he's not alone here. Not alone, and not welcome.

Karkat wakes up, and it's a relief.

Dave's face is buried in his chest, arm curled around his waist. Karkat puts an arm around his back, pulling him close, dropping his chin to Dave's hair. "Hey."

"Hey," Dave answers into his shirt, something hesitant in his voice that makes Karkat's brows furrow.

"Everything OK?"

"Just, you know. That tomorrow's the ninth."

Karkat's heart sinks. "Yeah."

"I didn't want to get fucked up about it this year."

"It's OK to get fucked up about it. There's no fucking time limit on this shit. No one's watching you, going, 'Dave has already reached the maximum number of years a human can be sad about something, but then he just fucking went ahead and was sad _again_. What an asshole.'"

Dave snorts into Karkat's shirt, hugging him tighter. "Yeah, I know. It's more for myself, I guess. I'm not ready for it. I don't want it to be tomorrow. Why can't it just be Friday? Like any other fucking Friday."

"Yeah." Karkat sighs into Dave's hair. Dave's fingers are tracing over the bumps of his spine, absently, nervously. "We'll be OK. I got you."

"Yeah. Yeah. Me too." Dave sighs. "Are _you_ gonna to be OK?"

Karkat thinks about it, and tightens his arm around Dave. "I don't know."

They fall into silence, just holding each other. Birds are beginning to trill in the back garden, shrill in the hush, and Bec snores lightly at the foot of the bed. "And. I've been thinking about Rose. A lot. Lately." Dave's voice is hoarse. Strange.

Karkat's stomach drops. The thought of Dave's sister churns up memories of his own friends: Terezi, Sollux. Kanaya. They probably all think he's dead. Actually, no. If any of them are still alive, it's probably too much to ask that they remember that he ever even existed. "Dave..."

"I know. I know. I can't like, not think about her, though. It was fucking stupid of me to try not to, even though it's so pointless to wonder..."

Terezi's grin swims in Karkat's memory. "Yeah. I know what you mean."

"What will you do if I die?"

Karkat stiffens, his eyes snapping open. "Dave...jesus christ..."

"Sorry."

"The likelihood of me outliving you is so fucking miniscule it's not even worth discussing."

"Yeah but. Shit happens."

"What will _you_ do when _I_ die?" Karkat retorts, and he hates that he can't keep that note of accusation out of his voice. He buries his face in that mess of blond hair, his heart thumping.

Dave falls silent for a few beats. "I mean. I feel like, what's even the point. Of anything. After that."

Karkat is struck by a chill that pierces him straight to the core. "Fuck you, no."

Dave is silent. Stiff.

"There have to be more humans out there somewhere. You could always..."

"There doesn't 'have to' be anything. We don't _know_ anything."

Karkat tightens his fingers in the back of Dave's shirt. 

"Shit, I'm sorry," Dave says into his chest, voice unsteady. "I shouldn't've just...shit."

"Don't..." Karkat lets out a frustrated puff of air. "I guess it's something we should...talk about. But...fuck."

Dave laughs a little, nervous, and they hold each other tighter and tighter. "I love you."

"I love you too."

Dave pulls himself up Karkat's body until he can kiss him on the lips, tense and nervous. Karkat kisses him back, rubbing the heel of his hand over the spot just between Dave's shoulder blades. They hold each other until Bec wakes up and stands over them, snuffling at their faces.

They follow their usual morning routine: feed the animals. Fire. Breakfast. There's such a subdued quiet between them, though, sad and fatalistic, and Karkat feels trapped by it.

Dave stands, pushing the dining room chair back over the wooden floor of the dining room, and the lines of his body are turning Karkat suddenly desperate. There's a terrible sadness in the slump of Dave's shoulders that Karkat needs...to...fix. He catches Dave by the elbow, rests his other hand at Dave's waist.

"Come back upstairs with me," Karkat says, gruffly, eyebrows drawn. Dave nods, a tiny smile tugging at the corners of his mouth that doesn't quite reach his eyes. They hold hands as they go up the stairs, and drop their clothes by the bedroom door.

They spend ages in bed just kissing, running exploring hands over bare skin. There's an edge of desperation in the motion of Dave's hands, in the first roll of his hips against Karkat's thigh. Karkat pushes him onto his back, hips between his thighs, dropping sucking kisses over the planes of Dave's chest. He laps at one nipple, rolling the other between his fingertips, and Dave lets out a long, breathy moan that turns Karkat's insides to fire.

Dave pushes him over and crawls down between his legs, tongue trailing over his slit and up the underside of his extending bulge. Karkat groans and cards his fingers through Dave's hair to cradle the back of his skull, hauling him close, and Dave moans.

He fucks Dave into the mattress until Dave is a writhing mess underneath him, gasping, hands moving desperately over Karkat's face, his arms, fingers clenching in his hair. He cries out when he comes, head thrown back, fingertips digging into Karkat's shoulders.

They draw water for a bath, bumping each other on purpose, laughing, throwing each other shy looks. They curl together in the cool water of the tub and kiss, over and over, until the sun is high in the sky.

"Help me pin this," Dave says, later, holding up his new windbreaker. He's already picked out the stitching of the side seams and the undersides of the sleeves all the way to the elbows. Karkat takes the pincushion he offers, and Dave pulls the jacket on inside-out over his head. He stands straight, holding his arms out to his sides.

"Dude, the shoulders are still halfway down your arms."

"That's cool. It's a new style I'm developing."

"My ass it is." Karkat leans forward on the couch and starts to do as Dave says anyway, pinning the jacket up the contours of Dave's sides. 

"I guess we should leave pretty early tomorrow, huh."

Karkat freezes for a split second with a pin halfway inserted into the fabric. "Yeah. Yeah, we should."

Dave is silent for a few loaded moments. "Do you think this is even OK? Is this even healthy? Collecting grief for a whole fucking year and then dumping it all out in one day?"

"What alternative are you proposing, exactly? That we spend every single day just wallowing in pain and isolation?"

"No, but..." Dave trails off, lost in thought. "I guess, like. I still think about them. So much. So I realized that I sort of do, anyway. And I don't really..." Dave lets out a little humorless laugh, "give a shit. About myself? But I hate thinking about you missing them and feeling like you can't talk to me about it because it's not 'the right time'."

Karkat drops the pin cushion onto the coffee table and shoves himself to his feet, grabbing Dave by the shoulders and turning him around. "Dave..." They lock eyes, and Dave looks so tired, tired and sad, that Karkat can't help but smooth his thumbs over Dave's jawline, to run the backs of his fingers down his cheek. "I thought you didn't want to talk about it. I thought..." Guilt and love slam into Karkat so forcefully that he throws his arms around Dave's shoulders, knocking him back a step. Dave's arms go around his waist, squeezing tighter and tighter, and there are three different places where pins are pricking him through his shirt but Karkat doesn't care, doesn't care at all. "Please talk to me about it. Whenever. Please. I thought this was what you wanted to do..."

"It was," Dave says, voice muffled in Karkat's shoulder. "I thought it was gonna make shit better. It was such a dumb fucking idea."

"So what. We tried it out. It didn't work. We'll try something else. We'll make it through. I got you."

"I miss them so much," Dave says, voice breaking, and Karkat hugs him tighter, eyes stinging.

 

_Karkat follows the human._

_He scrambled down an alley and up the stairs into a human hivestem when he first heard her voice, her lusus at his heels. A sharp command from her stops her lusus in its tracks, and it leaves him, retreating back down the alley. He climbs down, slowly, cautiously, and watches her leave, doing his best to stay out of sight._

_There's a large sun hat over her hair, and her long black braid swings back and forth behind her as she walks. She has a rifle over one shoulder, her faded blue skirt hanging just above the tops of her ankle-high boots. A large duffel bag bounces against her hip with every step._

_Despite any kind of good judgement he feels compelled to follow her, and he does, cautiously at first, then more and more recklessly, until the buildings become shorter, wider and farther apart, separated by enormous, dried-up lawnrings. She walks down a gravel path behind one of the larger hives, and Karkat rushes to keep up before he loses sight of her completely._

_He rounds the corner and jumps back in alarm, slipping backwards on the loose gravel. He'd run right into the barrel of her rifle, and she cries out in her strange language, eyes enormous behind her highly magnified glasses. Her lusus is growling, snarling, and Karkat turns his head away, his ankle throbbing where he'd twisted it, waiting for her to finish him off. She barks out a human word and her lusus whines and falls silent._

_She takes Karkat down a hatch and into a large, underground complex, the coolness of her hand still lingering on his from where she'd helped him stand. Karkat is still terrified, but her smile had been bright and encouraging, her teeth harmless and blunt._

_There are actual lights down here, and the faraway hum of a generator. There's another human in what looks to be a rumpusblock, and he jumps to his feet in shock when he sees Karkat. Karkat shrinks back behind the doorframe, and the two humans start yelling at each other._

_A third human appears in the far doorway, taller, with the palest hair Karkat has ever seen. Karkat tries to make himself as small as he possibly can, but it's too late. The pale-haired human is staring right at him, eyes round, and his hand goes in instinct to his side, clearly groping for a weapon that isn't there._

_The first human seems to have won over the second, or at least, stopped him from yelling, and now everyone is staring at Karkat. Why the_ fuck _did he come with her? Maybe_ she _won't kill him, but he has no such assurance from the others, none at all._

_The first human is named Jade, Karkat learns, and he repeats it back to her, the "J" sound sliding around in his mouth all wrong. The second is John. The third is Dave._

_When the humans eat, later, Karkat doesn't know what to do. Jade offers him a plate of what looks like meat, cooked almost all the way through, so that only the center is still red. He pales, thinking about the last time he tried to eat, but his gastric sac is empty, now, and the smell of the food is making him feel faint. He didn't die last time, so what makes this time any different? He can feel the eyes of the others on him as he eats._

_Jade shows him to a room at the end of the hallway. There's a large bolt on the outside of the door, which she demonstrates to Karkat, a resigned twist to her mouth. She flings the door wide and motions him inside, eyes pleading, and Karkat nods, mouth set in a determined line._

_Karkat is their prisoner, and he spends the night curled in a tight ball, arms around his middle, sweating, in pain._


	4. Chapter 4

  
_"Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its jagged edges.” -Herman Melville_  


Karkat huddles in the darkness, breath loud in the silence, louder and louder, and he can't stop it, can't stop the audible throb of his bloodpusher. He tries to make himself smaller, tries to squeeze farther and farther back into a space that's contracting more and more but his limbs won't cooperate. His body feels like lead and he can't...he can't move.

 _It_ knows he's here. They _all_ know he's here.

He wakes up with a start.

Dave is still asleep but Karkat buries his face in his chest, pulse hammering like he'd just biked halfway across the city at full tilt. He takes deep breaths, like Dave taught him, in his nose, out his mouth.

"Hey..." Dave says, still half asleep, hand patting clumsily at Karkat's hair, at the back of his neck. "S'time to...get up?"

"Bad dream," Karkat manages to get out, squeezing his eyes shut, and Dave pulls him close, arms encircling him, warm and secure and incredible.

"Hey, shh, babe, hey. It's OK." Dave rubs his back, lips pressed to his hair. "S'not real. I got you now."

They set out in the dreary early morning chill, Karkat with a backpack full of food, water, and a blanket, Dave with his sword slung over his back. Dave commands Bec to stay in the yard with the chickens, and Bec whines, as he usually does, but obeys.

The sky gleams dirty white. A weak mist hangs over the city. Everything is damp, a fine layer of condensation over the windshields of abandoned cars, on storefront windows, dripping from the leaves of overgrown ornamental trees. Karkat pulls his hood up over his horns. The bottom cuffs of his jeans are already wet.

They walk hand and hand through the empty streets for what feels like hours, the chatter of birds drowning out their footsteps. A deer steps out from behind a building two blocks away, silent, graceful, like a ghost, and Dave stops in his tracks, squeezing Karkat's hand. Its antlers stretch upwards, many pronged, fractalled, and it freezes, nostrils flaring, before bolting down the street, the white underside of its tail flashing in the gloom.

Even if they'd brought Jade's rifle with them, they're not hunting today.

By the time they get to the farmhouse the sun is high in the sky, a bright smudge in the dismal layer of clouds. Karkat wishes he could say that the farmhouse looks the same as it always has, but it doesn't.

Large swathes of the roof are missing shingles, parts of it collapsed inward. Half the windows are broken. The wooden siding is grey and warped, claimed by ivy, and the satellite antenna on the roof has finally been knocked over by the storms. The single large tree in the front has been struck by lightning, too, the top of it blackened and split halfway down the large trunk. Karkat averts his eyes, holding tightly to Dave's hand.

They make their way around the house, feet crunching in the gravel of the driveway, then muffled in the wet grass along the overgrown path to the edge of the hill. Karkat's shoes are soaked through, now, a chill seeping into his socks.

Dave heaves at the wheel on the bunker door until it finally gives and spins clockwise with a squeal of protest. He tugs at the heavy door, the entrance waxing into a yawning hole, black and bottomless as deep space. The air inside is stale.

Everything is so...

Still.

When Dave and Karkat left the bunker, they took almost everything with them, everything irreplaceable, supplies, preserved food, seedlings, chickens. It's empty here now, hushed, as Karkat's flashlight sweeps over the thin layer of dust on every surface. They leave new footprints over the old ones, following the same path they usually do, through the living room, through the kitchen, through the dried up gardens, through the bedrooms. John and Jade's clothes are exactly as they left them, Jade's hanging up, silent, in her closet, John's crammed into his messy dresser, sticking every which way out of the half-shut drawers.

"I don't want to come back here again," Karkat says when they get back to the living room, his voice cracking in the silence. "Fuck this. _Fuck_ this. What are we doing? Why do we do this?" Dave's arms are around him before he finishes speaking, and they cling together in the dark.

"Yeah. Fuck this. Fuck...it..." Dave is trembling, and Karkat rubs his back. He lets out an awful little hiccup of a breath. "They wouldn't want us to do this kind of shit. They wouldn't want..."

"Yeah," Karkat answers when Dave can't finish. "Let's go. Let's just...go home."

Dave pulls back, hands on Karkat's shoulders. "No, we should...finish this. It'll be the last time. But I think we should finish."

Karkat nods, mouth twisting.

They spread their blanket out over the damp grass west of the bunker, by the graves. They eat apples and jerky and watch the wind in the trees.

Two of the gravestones are large rocks from the creek over the hill, one grey and slick, the other yellow and porous. The other two are stacks of cinder blocks. A pair of broken sunglasses still sits next to the grey stone even after all this time, one arm missing, one of the lenses nothing more than a spiderweb of cracks.

"They'd want us to live," Dave is finally able to finish.

"Yeah."

"I mean. We do."

"Yeah." Karkat pitches his apple core into the bushes at the bottom of the hill. "But I know what you mean. They'd want us to remember the good shit, and not like..."

"Wallow in misery?"

"Yeah."

"You...can always talk to me about your old friends. Too," Dave says after a few moments, eyes on the blanket. "You hardly ever talk about them, and I mean. If you don't want to that's OK but..."

"I want to," Karkat interrupts. "I just...not now. But I will." They lock eyes, and Karkat's breath catches at the devotion in Dave's. He takes a deep breath. "Remember that one time John forgot to lock the door to the chicken coop and when we woke up in the morning they were _everywhere_? All over the place, on the couch, on the table, there was that one that ended up in the fucking _toilet_..."

Dave laughs, almost in surprise. "Yeah. Yeah. Jade was so fuckin' mad, I swear all the chickens just like moped back into the coop just like John did to his room..."

The corners of Karkat's mouth are turning up. Dave's eyes are brighter, the lines between his eyebrows fading.

"Oh my god. Remember how John would always pull those dumbshit elementary school word tricks on you? Like telling you to spell 'I cup' or asking if you liked seafood? I think he never got over the fact that that shit stopped working on other kids after the age of six."

Karkat runs a hand over his face. "Holy fuck. He's such an _asshole_."

They both laugh.

"And Jade's...not. I..." Karkat takes a breath, and lets it out. "I just...I'll never forget how...she didn't know anything about me. She didn't know if I was going to hurt her. Or hurt _you_. But she invited me in, anyway. She saved my fucking life, and then..." Karkat's lip is trembling, now, even though he's still smiling, and tears overflow his eyes. Dave puts a hand over his own mouth, squeezing his eyes shut. When he opens them his eyelashes are wet.

"I've been...I guess I've just been thinking a lot lately about...about my dad. About..." He reaches for Karkat's hand, and Karkat takes it.

"Tell me."

"I just...hate that he was right. I mean..."

Karkat squeezes his hand.

"Jade and I grew up thinking that the world was gonna end, you know? And that we'd have to know how to survive? And we believed it for so long. Believed that we were the only ones who knew the truth, because our fucking guardians _told_ us that we were. And when I got old enough to understand what a load of bullshit it all was I wished so hard and so long that Mom had got custody of me, too, that I'd gone to live in New York with _regular_ people instead of a motherfucking _doomsday cult_...but then, Jade would've been..."

Karkat drops Dave's hand and moves towards him on the blanket, framing his face with both hands, looking into his eyes. Dave settles one hand on his knee.

"I just...hate this. I just can't forget the expression on his face the night he and Jade's grandpa...went. Out. It was the first time I'd _ever_ seen him...happy. And yeah. I'm alive, and you're alive, because of everything they taught us, but it's not like they said, not at all, fighting wasn't...necessary, and they just...left us, they left us by ourselves, we were fucking...sixteen..."

Dave pulls away from Karkat's hands and pushes himself to his feet. He grabs his sword from the edge of the blanket and unsheathes it, then drives it deep into the ground in front of one of the stacks of cinder blocks.

He stares down at the grave, shoulders slumped. "Thanks. And also, fuck. You."

 

_It takes surprisingly little time for John to accept him._

_John and Jade chatter constantly to him, occasionally telling him the names of objects, the names of actions. There's a lot less complexity in their pronunciation than he's used to in his own, and despite the few sounds he still has a hard time producing exactly he's finding the language relatively easy to replicate. Both of them offer him clothing from their own closets, and Karkat is so confused by this apparent offer for him to choose which of their signs to wear that he just picks a blank item from each, a long sleeved black t-shirt from Jade's, a pair of jeans from John's, which are close enough in size around the hips but puddle around his heels. He rolls each side up twice._

_Most of what they say is still a garbled mystery, but he's getting to know them, anyway, from their reactions, from their expressions. Jade is optimistic, and stubborn about it. John is equally stubborn, but less optimistic, and both of them have a mean streak when they're pushed too far, usually by each other. Karkat tries to figure out why these humans are here, and what they mean to each other, but he can't._

_Dave is even more of a mystery. In the beginning he was completely elusive, totally silent, only visible while darting through rooms, headphones over his ears. Most of the time he's completely absent, except for mealtimes. Karkat tries not to think about him, about the tense line of his shoulders._

_The longer Karkat stays, helping Jade in the hydroponic garden, taking care of the chickens, watching movies with John, Dave appears more and more. He starts to talk, rambling and low, to the others, but mostly to himself, as he goes about his business. He laughs, too, the first time Karkat loses his shit and starts yelling at John in broken English over a lousy gamegrub. Somehow afterwards the two of them lock eyes across the room, and Dave lowers his gaze like he's been caught. Karkat doesn't know what the fuck that was supposed to mean._

_The next time he's curled up on his side on the couch after a meal, gritting his teeth and losing himself in a movie as best he can, Dave comes in and stands over him. He's holding out a weird rubbery rectangular...thing, eyes fixed on the floor._

_"Hot water bottle," he says, letting it swing back and forth, until Karkat can hear water sloshing around inside. Hot. Water. Bottle. He knows all those words._

_"Hot water bottle," Karkat repeats out of habit, eyes narrowing. What is the point of this?_

_Dave holds it to his middle with both arms and curls around it in demonstration. He straightens and holds it out, eyes still downcast, and Karkat takes it, brows furrowing. It's warm. Dave's eyes flick to his for just a moment. "Go for it," he says, and Karkat copies his actions, curling around the bottle, letting the warmth sink in through his shirt._

_Relief washes over him a little at a time. Muscles all over his body are relaxing, unknotting, as the pain dulls, not much, but enough. He opens his eyes just in time to see Dave disappearing into the other room, just in time to see the corner of his smile._

_It becomes a sort of routine between them, an oddly private thing. Karkat shouldn't be accepting the help of anyone in this way, it's not right, when...they're...it's...too much. But he can't help it. There's a warmth, now, in his chest, and it's burning._


End file.
